Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 12:52:16 +0100 From: Steve Roome <steve@sse0691.bri.hp.com> To: Michael Grant <mgrant@grant.org> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Space Message-ID: <20000929125215.D4945@moose.bri.hp.com> In-Reply-To: <39D39975.30253583@grant.org>; from mgrant@grant.org on Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 09:18:13PM %2B0200 References: <200009281832.e8SIWM574057@voyager.bxscience.edu> <39D39975.30253583@grant.org>
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On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 09:18:13PM +0200, Michael Grant wrote: > Is there a way to grow a filesystem on freebsd? If there is, and if > swap is butt up against /, then make a new swap on another drive (or > live with a small swap) and just grow root into the swap partition. Simple answer : No. Better answer : Not yet, but you can always try with a hex editor, fsdb and shortly after a new partition (possibly larger, possibly somewhat empty !) Longer answer : (aka : mad rambling, stop reading here!) Is it in -current yet ? Depending on how stupid (not kidding!) your're feeling you can try to get around some of these limits, for instance, myself and a friend once managed to get a partition bigger than it really was by various giggery-pokery. For the life of me I can't find the message I sent to the mailing list, and it was either FreeBSD 2.1.0 or earlier). I'm not gonna try remember what we did that long ago. I can safely say though that it really shouldn't have worked at the time, it took all night, involved much use of fsdb, a lot of coffee and would probably have been much easier and certainly far safer to just buy another disk, and with hindsight was probably less amazing than I remember. Besides, thinking back I expect it wouldn't have worked for long before various important bits of filesystem ended up being overwritten with various files. I know there's interest, (ready to be stirred up =) ) in expanding filesystems, which is something some of us folks with other unix system probably do regularly... I went to a FreeBSD meeting at Oxford in the UK recently and a certain person (who's hopefully reading this) did express a large amount of interest in actually adding proper support to do what you want (and it sounded very much like he'd spent time looking into this), however unless he (or someone else knowledgable) does it, it'll probably be another five years before we find someone with both suitable interest or ability to actually get this working. > I've never heard of a shrinkfs though, so once you grow it, you're > stuck with it. Apparently that's just about impossible, or at least unfeasible. Sorry for the overlong email, perhaps I should've sent it to -hackers because it's more of an attempt to stir interest, as I said it's been about five years since I first tried to do this, and it's one of the biggest problems I have with FreeBSD. Consider this, HP-UX 10.20 has it, and FreeBSD doesn't. This makes HP-UX look better than FreeBSD to some. Maybe that's a good thing (from where I'm sending this), but I'm sure not many on this mailing list would think so. [my opinion on that would be better sent from a different mailing list!] [I thought of sending a "Full answer", but that really would be for -hackers and would bore the pants of most, even if hypothetically speaking, I knew what I was talking about, and how to write it.] Good luck, Steve * Boring, but important, disclaimer : I'm not acting as a mouthpiece * for HP. If HP corporately (or not) agrees with anything in this * email, it's coincidence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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